Dubai: Despite late entry, Oracle’s shift to the cloud is now producing more robust growth and can compete against rivals, a regional executive of the company told Gulf News.
“All the investments we have been making and the growth we are attaining point to that. We have more than 500 applications that are on the cloud platform and that is expected to lift us further,” said Arun Khehar, senior vice-president for applications business at Oracle ECEMEA (East Central Europe, Middle East and Africa).
“We have been selling public cloud so far but we are ready to deploy private cloud offerings in enterprises premises. The data stays under their roof but managed and controlled by Oracle,” he said.
Oracle claims to be present in all the segment of the cloud from top to bottom — on-premises computing with hardware and software all the way up to cloud with SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.
“We had a head start in offering on-premises licenses but right now more than 77 per cent of our regional business is in the cloud. In the next three years, I expect that there will no on-premises. The best is yet to come. Based on what I have seen, what is there today and what is coming. We have just touched the tip. 2018 is to be a very excellent year for us,” Khehar said.
During the fourth quarter, Oracle’s total cloud revenues reached $1.36 billion (Dh4.99 billion), accounting for 13 per cent of its overall revenues.
Khehar said that the industry is going through a major transformation in the way IT is consumed. Cloud is the future and Oracle has been working incredibly hard for last several years to accelerate its journey to the cloud and is making tremendous progress and transition.
He said that big chunk of the business comes from the Middle East and it is a high growth area for the company. The region has one of the highest adoptions for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) globally.
Oracle moved into the cloud business around three-and-a-half years back.
Amazon has a market share of 40 per cent and is a leading player in the cloud space. Microsoft, IBM, and Google are the other top players followed by Oracle and Alibaba.
To strengthen its offerings in the region, Oracle expects its Abu Dhabi data centre to go live by end of the year.
Global vendors like Oracle and SAP have announced data centres in the UAE that will cater to the wider Gulf region. And among the system integrators, Alpha Data launched its Alpha Cloud towards the end of 2015 to provide UAE customers with a multi-tenant scalable architecture, while Emircom has set up a new data center for co-location, with plans to offer cloud services in a few years’ time.
Of the local public cloud providers, eHDF has launched its portfolio of cloud services, while Injazat is expanding its cloud offerings. Some of the big Chinese players are also getting involved, with Alibaba setting up a data centre in Dubai and Huawei is planning to formally launch its end-to-end cloud portfolio soon.
Khehar said Oracle is predicting more of its large customers to move to the cloud and as a result its next fiscal year will see dramatic growth in the PaaS and IaaS cloud businesses.
According to Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice-president and regional managing director at IDC, about 41 per cent of Middle East chief information officers plan to implement private clouds over the 2016-2017 period, with 31 per cent planning to invest in public cloud services over the same period.
In 2016, he said that 12.5 per cent of the region’s infrastructure spend was dedicated to cloud buildouts, a figure that is expected to top 25 per cent within the next five years.
For enterprises looking for a cost-effective approach to driving operational efficiencies, he added that cloud computing undoubtedly represents the transforming future of IT investment opportunities, and the offerings landscape is wide open with both private and public cloud options.
According to Gartner, IaaS is projected to grow 36.8 per cent globally in 2017 and reach $34.6 billion. SaaS is expected to increase 20.1 per cent, reaching $46.3 billion in 2017.
“We expect both our PaaS and IaaS businesses to accelerate into hyper-growth, the same kind of growth we are seeing with SaaS (Software-as-a-Service),” Khehar said.
“We have big expectations and big challenges. We are adding on an average more than 300 SaaS customers every quarter in the region and have 600 live customers as of now. Oracle has more than 2,000 cloud customers from the region,” he said.
